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Best of Times, Worst of Times: Stuart Urban

Stuart Urban was 12 when he discovered his father had been persecuted by the KGB. Now 51, he recalls an emotional journey into the former Soviet Union to recover evidence of his father’s imprisonments and escapes

My father was the eldest child of a large family from Bratkovitse, a shtetl [Jewish village] in eastern Galicia - part of Poland when the second world war began, now in Ukraine. After the war he spent 20 years trying to find out if anyone else in his family had survived. Eventually he was asked to contact somebody in Israel who, it was believed, was Dad's brother. My father sent names and nicknames of his parents and siblings, and a telegram came back containing one word: "Correct".

I remember the incredible emotion surrounding that telegram. Soon after my parents took me and my brother to meet our Uncle Menachem and his family. We knew something special had happened: these people loved us, even though they'd never seen us before. For the first time, I saw my father cry.